Haute, American Style

The first part of Patric Kuh’s “The Last Days of Haute Cuisine: America’s Culinary Revolution” (Viking, $24.95) retells the old story of how haute cuisine was revived in New York in the 1940s by Henri Soule, whose snobbish Le Pavillon made generations of Americans live in fear of haughty French waiters, and how a new guard eventually swept away that atmosphere of social slights and shattering expense. Kuh has done original research and actually adds to our knowledge of the subject.

But then his story has to take him to California, and in the process it gets snarled up with Kuh’s personal quest as a part-French guy who was raised in Ireland, cooked in restaurants in France (always wanting to be a writer) and is trying to reconcile himself to living in California. It’s evidently a difficult reconciliation; like many a Frenchman, Kuh finds much to loathe and resent in this upstart place. We don’t have traditions, we don’t have “context,” we don’t have a “sense of place.” Sometimes he’s like the sort of American who goes to Europe and can only complain about how narrow the streets are and that not every hotel room has a private bathroom.

His criticisms belong to an aristocratic tradition of disdain for the vulgar modern world. Since Kuh thinks of himself as a man of the Left, though (he tries to give the word “revolution” in his subtitle a political resonance), he prefers to blame California’s flawed existence not on its modernity but on capitalism--to wit, the large-scale agriculture that was made possible by the transcontinental railroads.

But he never asks what became of all that large-scale produce. Well, it got shipped to parts of the country that otherwise would scarcely have had any vegetables for much of the year. Kuh’s ideal of little communities with a “sense of place” eating their own seasonal produce begins to sound like Soule’s sort of snobbish, exclusive cuisine, only this time not for the very rich but for the happy few who live in Kuh’s sort of town.